YOU LET ME IN, by Camilla Bruce

My third foray into Camilla Bruce’s works proved to be quite different from the previous  experiences, which were novels based on historical figures of serial killers on which the author had construed a partly imagined story.  You Let Me In is quite different instead, being based on totally fictional characters, and in particular that of Cassie Tipp, a successful novelist with an obscure past: the book starts a year after her mysterious disappearance, as her niece Penelope and nephew Janus visit their aunt’s home with the instruction to read her last manuscript, at the end of which they will find the key to retrieve Cassie’s considerable inheritance.

The manuscript is addressed directly to Penelope and Janus and tells Cassie’s life-story, or at least the woman’s version of it, since it becomes apparent after a while that she might be an unreliable narrator: always something of an outsider in her own family, Cassandra grew up isolated from her judgmental mother and picture perfect younger sister, from an indifferent father and absentee brother; her only constant companion was Pepper Man, a creature only she could see and who created a predatory relationship with her, drinking Cassie’s blood like a vampire. 

Later on, as the relationship between Cassie and Pepper Man moves toward sexual intimacy, he introduces her to his faerie domain, peopled by weird and terrifying creatures in whose company Cassie feels more at ease than with true human beings.  Even her courtship and marriage with a local boy is tampered with by the intrusion of these otherworldly beings, to the point that his gruesome death lays heavy shadows on Cassie who is suspected of his murder.  And that’s not the only dubious occurrence, because a few years later Cassie’s father and brother die in what looks like a murder-suicide, but also presents some bizarre details that once again shine some unwelcome light on her person.

All of the above, of course, comes from Cassie’s perspective, because readers are also made aware of a psychiatrist’s evaluation which labels her outlandish stories as a way to cope with domestic abuse, processing this trauma through the lens of the fantasies that to Cassie have become a world within the real one – a version that Cassie constantly repudiates as a flight of fancy on the doctor’s part. And here stands the true mystery of this story, because both versions could be true, and both versions speak of a life-long ordeal in which the victim, Cassie, has found a way to structure her suffering into a creation where, in the end, she accepts everything as “normal” and even finds a modicum of happiness, twisted as it might be: the sections where she speaks of her relationship with Pepper Man as a loving one, where she says that he does indeed love her, are among the more chillingly disturbing of the whole book.

That Cassie is a victim, and has been for most of her life, is without doubt, because no matter what version of the story you believe – that of the blood-sucking Pepper Man and his  cadre of supernatural beings, or that of the dysfunctional family in which she was always an outsider and the victim of abuse, physical and verbal – it could be argued that she shows definite symptoms of Stockholm’s Syndrome and of a coping mechanism that makes her accept the horrors of such a life as something “normal”, and in some instance even acceptable.  The distinction between what’s real and what’s imagined is made even more difficult, if not impossible, by a total lack of an outside point of view: every detail, every occurrence is always mediated through Cassie’s perspective, even Dr. Martin’s evaluation, so that the readers find themselves in the impossibility to verify the facts as presented.

No matter what side of the story one might believe in, Cassie’s journey remains a fascinatingly compelling one: Camilla Bruce has a way of drawing her readers in and keep them grimly fascinated as they try to perceive the truth of the situation which must lie between the line, but remains elusive throughout the whole length of the book.  Even the end manages to keep the mystery alive because the final surprise that Cassie springs on her heirs is one that leaves the door open to interpretation, shrouding it in one of those faerie arrangements that showcase the cruelly duplicitous nature of those creatures – provided that they exist, of course…

It was a final twist I did not expect and that left me both shocked and admiring of the subtle tapestry that the author has woven with this story, one that I find difficult to forget.

My Rating: